Progressive National Baptist Convention

He served at World Vision, led the faith initiative at the World Bank, worked in the White House as a fellow, and wrote a book called A More Perfect Union about rebuilding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of the beloved community.

He is also here because he is a pastor, ordained in the American Baptist tradition and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a black church lineage with the civil rights movement in its bloodline.

That's the tradition that read the same Bible as the fusion we've been studying and arrived at the opposite conclusion of where Christian nationalism stands today.

And it has woven faith and public life together for two centuries without apologizing for either.

Thank you very much.

I think one thing that's really interesting to me is that you talk about the diversity within faith traditions and maybe how that relates to you personally.

I believe you were ordained in the American Baptist tradition and the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

which came to emergence in 1961 when clergy committed to the Civil Rights Movement.

Uh, it gets so ugly, again, the fight breaks out, somebody dies, uh, and for those of you who are good Baptists listening to me right now, you know that today there are two Baptist conventions.

There is the National Baptist Convention USA, and there is the Progressive Baptist Convention.

There are two conventions in part because the convention split after that fight.

Uh, a lot of folk left the National Baptist Convention and went to start the Progressive Baptist, and you end up with two Baptist conventions all these years later, but it started in part because of that fight that broke out at that convention when J.H. Jackson did not wanna relinquish the gavel to being the president of the National Baptist Convention.

He was also the senior political director initially at Sojourners.

He is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and he serves in ministry at the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.

Adam has become a good friend of mine.

I am so appreciative of his care for the world and the way he manifests it in his work.

I actually became his teaching assistant my second year, and then that started kind of a friendship and a mentorship that ultimately led me to join the board of the organization and then on staff my first time around as a political director, and then ultimately 15 years after that to kind of come back and enter into a leadership transition with Jim where I ultimately became president.

Well, I am deeply rooted in the Black church tradition and ordained in the American Baptist Church and then

the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

What I love about Sojourners is it brings together so many of the different streams of the Christian tradition.